Bachelor Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Bonn, course: Settler Colonial Narratives (Australia), language: English, abstract: This paper tries to reconstruct the history of European Settlers coming to Australia in order to build up a new existence on foreign ground. The overall aim is to establish an understanding of the concept of terra nullius that labeled Australia literally into a no man’s land and thereby justified and enabled its annexation by the inrushing convicts, settlers, entrepreneurs and adventurers. Within colonial discourse a colony was founded on the acquisition of land by occupation or settlement of a terra nullius. Although the presence of the Indigenous peoples was acknowledged, they were considered to be primitive and uncivilised. According to the colonial power without any visible political system the Indigenous peoples had no sovereignty over the land and no laws that would assert their land rights. Driven by the empowerment of terra nullius the newcomers claimed land as their own, mapped and named it. With these insights the focus of this paper will shift to the historical novel The Secret River by Kate Grenville in order to follow the protagonist William Thornhill’s efforts to build up a new existence for his family in Australia and to present how the settlers’ motivations and methods of claiming and possessing of land were implemented. The dispossession of the Indigenous peoples of Australia was legally recognised through the Mabo judgement in 1992 that overturned the terra nullius fiction and acknowledged that Indigenous peoples had lived in Australia for thousands of years and enjoyed rights to their land according to their own laws and customs.

This book addresses the way cities have given rise to key aesthetic dispositions that are central to debates in World Literature.

'Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and Australian Book Industry Awards, Book of the Year. After a childhood of poverty and petty crime in the slums of London, William Thornhill is transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. With his wife Sal and children in tow, he arrives in a harsh land that feels at first like a de...

The situation of religious institutional diminishment in many Western countries requires new approaches to the proclamation of Christian faith. As a response to these complexities, Karl Rahner suggested a “mystagogic” approach as a future pathway for theology. A mystagogical approach seeks modes of spiritual and theological conversation which engage the religious imagination and draws upon personal experiences of transcendence and religious sensibility. In Karl Rahner, Culture and Evangelization: New Approaches in an Australian Setting, Anthony Mellor develops a reflective process of contemporary “mystagogia”, describing how different fields of engagement require different patterns of mystagogical conversation. While focussing on the Australian setting, these differentiate arenas of engagement are also applicable to other cultural settings and offer fresh perspectives for evangelization today.

Examining international case studies including USA, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, this book identifies and explores the use of heritage throughout the world. Challenging the idea that heritage value is self-evident, and that things must be preserved, it demonstrates how it gives tangibility to the values that underpin different communities.

This is a much-needed survey of how relationships between indigenous peoples and the archaeological establishment have got into difficulties, and a pointer towards how things could move forward.

Landscape of Farewell is the story of Max Otto, an elderly German academic. After the death of his much-loved wife and his recognition that he will never write the great study of history that was to be his life's crowning work, Max believes his life is all but over. Everything changes, though, when his valedictory lecture is challenged by Professor Vita McLelland, a feisty young Australian Aboriginal academic visiting Germany. Their meeting and growing friendship sets Max on a journey that would have seemed unthinkable just a few short weeks earlier. When, at Vita's invitation, Max travels to Australia, he forms a deep friendship with her uncle, Aboriginal elder Dougald Gnapun. It is a friendship that not only gives new meaning and purpose to Max, but which teaches him the profound importance of truth-telling in reconciliation with his own and his country's past.